Carolyn (Carrie) Reese defended her doctoral dissertation, "An Intermedial Incision: Ana Mendieta's Moving Image Media", on Tuesday, June 1, 2021. The committee consisted of Meghan Sutherland (supervisor), James Cahill, Brian Price, Elizabeth Wijaya, exam chair John Burgess, and external examiner Rebecca A. Sheehan (California State University, Fullerton).
We asked Carrie about her work and her interests, as well as her plans for the near future. She says:
My thesis foregrounds the impact of media in Ana Mendieta’s moving-image work, demonstrating how her work allows for media-theoretical ideas to be reassessed through an intermedial lens.
Mendieta became the subject of my dissertation because of the way her work allows one to think about displacement and the tension that borders and liminal media spaces create. These spaces interest me as they appear both within my academic work and outside of it.
My next research project conceptualizes a feminist discourse that arises from the labor of film editing, a job historically given to un- or under-credited women workers. In the meantime, I will be working the gig economy in Toronto while applying to postdocs and academic jobs.
Prof. Cahill noted that Carrie's thesis skillfully brings close formal analysis of a much-neglected body of moving image art to life with her probing and playful deconstructive readings that elaborate ambitious theoretical stakes for how we understand such foundational issues for cinema and media theory such as figuration, indexicality, and cutting. Nobody who reads Carrie's thesis will look at Ana Mendieta's work in the same way.
Congratulations, Dr. Reese!